As the road curved over Mahim Causeway, leaving the vegetal
growth of the airport slums behind, I wound
down the window and
felt the heat move immediately from a
supporting role to centre
stage, bringing in a gust of wind with the
consistency of old lamb
gravy. Another, fresher smell overlaid the
greasy aroma of drains.
Yes, it had rained recently, the driver told
me: rain, although not
the rains, which explained why the temperature
hadn't dropped.
I had not forgotten the violence of India's
monsoon reversal,
nor the scent of soil releasing different
chemicals as it turned
from dry land into wet. My father, a man whose
passion for facts
was exceeded only by my mother's for fiction,
once analyzed the
smell of rain. Its formula, he said, depends
upon where it
falls--on dry or wet ground. "First there is
petrichor, the dry
smell of unbaked clay, from the Greek for
`stone-essence.' Later,
that muddy, fertile flavour of geosmin." Earth
smell: found in the
flesh of bottom-feeders like carp and catfish.
Purpose of visit? Transformation from stone
into earth.
The driver told me that in the north, near
Lucknow, there was a
small industry specializing in the smell of
Indian rain. They put
clay disks outdoors in the premonsoon months of
May and June to
absorb the water vapour in the air, then
steam-distilled the smell
from the disks, bottled it, and sold it under
the name matti ka
attar. "Is meaning `perfume of the earth,'" he
said.
Perfume of the earth. I rolled the words
around in my mouth,
only half listening as my guide ran through a
list of this country's
other, less volatile attractions. "You are
knowing Bombay,
madam? You must be knowing then that this is
land stolen from
the sea."